I think it's the same kind of idea, because it shuts down any duty to worry about whether you are right. You get to be a dogmatist, since dogmatists die eventually.

The second sentence deserves some response, but I don't know what to make of it. Mistakes are good, surely? More mistakes faster. Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.

I don't really see an issue with it either, though it depends on what exactly you mean by a dogmatist.

Literally everyone operates within some framework of unprovable dogmas to be able to tell good from evil and to decide how to act. Accepting that fact is a IMO a better path than striving for some sort of non-existent objective skepticism (but that's only better within my framework of what better is, of course).

And surely I worry whether I'm right, and all the time. It's just that when I worry and estimate the expected value of my decisions, I don't get NaNs and INFs. My life is not infinitely valuable to me, engaging in activities that involve possible loss of my life is often a good decision because the upside is good. That's largely true because I die anyway, I'm not sure the same calculations would hold if I were immortal.

UPD to respond to the second part that was added later

> Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.

It's remarkably easy to ruin your life by dying or getting a permanent disability. Would you climb a mountain with a risk of avalanches and rockfalls if you were otherwise immortal? Even commuting to work by bicycle becomes questionable, chances of getting hit by a car on a crossing are pretty high compared to taking the metro.

I almost completely disagree with "everyone operates within some framework of unprovable [moral] dogmas", but I don't completely disagree. I think the potential for mind-changing debate about moral matters - some of it inexplicit, but still rational - is enormous: and that the dogmatic cores of almost everyone's moral worldviews are, in modern times, practically identical, or close enough to be compatible.

More to the point, you can refrain from being unnecessarily dogmatic. As I'm sure you do really. But that means anticipation of death, to wipe out your ideas, shouldn't diminish your will to filter them through argument or thought. It just acts as a safety mechanism against your possibly losing your grip on rationality and becoming an intransigent old nuisance, I suppose.

So the second point is that self-sacrifice is less expensive for the mortal. I guess that could be seen as a rather cold fact that a mortal person is less valuable. But immortal people could be hindered by being all neurotic about risks to their lives, if that even is how we make decisions about self-sacrifice and mortal danger (however mild - germs?) ... but I suspect that isn't a calculation we'd do, even if immortal. I suspect the basis for these decisions is something different. This makes me scratch my head, I may come back to it.

...OK, ready. This is really about a certain puzzle to which immortality is irrelevant, which is: how can we take risks at all? If you cross the street you might lose your life, and since that's everything you've got, the cost is infinitely large, so you can never cross the street.

There are numerous tangents to go on from there. If you're being objective, your value is your ideas, your relationships, and your potential to have future ideas. With the last in mind, maybe immortality does change the calculation? Maybe risk-taking for mortal people should increase with age. Well, we do tend to self-sacrifice in a crisis, and to save children preferentially (though I'm not sure why future potential should trump existing ideas in a person). And there's this "I've lived a full life, I'll be the one" trope, which really means "I'm nearly dead already, so I'm expendable." And sure, immortal people can't say that. But that doesn't have bearing on how young people can complete routine life goals such as crossing the street.

You could also claim that a decision like deciding to stay in bed is risky in itself, and that we take risky actions in order to minimize risk. But I don't think that's truly the normal way to operate.

The main thing is, we do decide to take risks somehow. We know that decision paralysis is bad: we're morally opposed to it. And this would remain true even if we were immortal and were risking the loss of much longer lives. Mortal or not, we risk all we've got, all the time, by living lives. The difference is only in an extreme self-sacrifice situation, where relative to one other younger person an immortal person would feel less disposable than an old mortal might.